webOS

This week former CEO of Palm Jon Rubinstein spoke up on Palm and the software and user interface elements the company created that are now being adopted industry-wide. For those that knew the mobile operating system webOS as created by the former company called Palm, the release of iOS 7 - as well as many other updates to OS' both mobile and desktop - the similarities to certain unique elements cannot be dismissed.

It's not every day you hear of a smartphone technology getting its own massive 22,000 word, 55-page write up. But that's just what's been announced this week as the article known as "Palm: I'm Ready to Wallow Now" is offered up on the back of the decades-long history of the operating system. Writer Thom Holwerda speaks of the death of the mobile operating system and the long - surprisingly long - life it had before its demise.

Michael Pryce-Jones, senior governance policy analyst for the CtW Investment Group, stated that he will be campaigning against HP directors G. Kennedy Thompson and John Hammergren at HP’s annual shareholder meeting on March 20th. Pryce-Jones states that both Thompson and Hammergren should be held responsible for “HP’s missteps” including the fall out from its acquisition of the UK software company, Autonomy. Pryce-Jones does not want to campaign against HP’s board chairman, Raymond Lane, because he feels that unseating Lane would result in destabilization in HP’s future.

It was only a few years ago that a lot of people hoped Palm's WebOS would be the next big thing in the smartphone market. Unfortunately, the operating system proved to be unpopular and HP eventually purchased Palm and the operating system with big plans of building tablets powered by WebOS. The tablets proved unpopular leaving HP with a huge amount of money spent on Palm and very little return on that investment.

While webOS is no longer officially around, thanks to HP's merciless hack and slash last year, developers are still keeping the operating system alive with the Open webOS initiative. We've already seen ASUS's Transformer Prime tablet boot up on Open webOS, but it looks like the Google's own Nexus 7 Android tablet has been given the webOS treatment as well.

If you're a fan of the defunct smartphone operating system webOS, you will be glad to hear that the Phoenix project has moved forward. A company called Phoenix International Communications has been working on a project with the goal of getting Open webOS to run as an app on Android hardware.

HP's PC chief has dismissed Microsoft's Surface tablet as "slow and a little kludgey" and blamed the tech press for over-hyping what he would "hardly call ... competition" to HP's own products. "Holistically, the press has made a bigger deal out of Surface than what the world has chosen to believe" Todd Bradley told CITEworld, going on to say that HP's initial focus with Windows tablets is the enterprise, with consumer-centric models not expected until 2013.

LG is tipped to be developing a webOS-based smart TV, using the open source platform in favor of Google TV, after concerns about the Android-base OS' momentum. The deal has seen LG dispatch engineers and prototype hardware to HP's Sunnyvale Gram facility, webOS Nation's source claims, with the goal of showcasing the first models at CES 2013 in January.

HP's TouchPad and Palm devices may be long and gone, but webOS (the mobile OS that these devices ran off of) has been alive and well despite its hardware extinction, mostly thanks to its open-source status. Open webOS, as its now called, went into beta in August, and now a month later, a final stable build is ready for consumption as version 1.0.

It appears that the HP smartphone is coming back to the universe with Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich taking the wheel where webOS left off - that's what a benchmark discovered in the depths of odd product testing is telling us this week. What we're seeing here is a GLBenchmark set of test results that shows a device code-named Bender with the HP branding sitting right up top. Powering this device, if it is indeed a real device, that is, is a Qualcomm S4 dual-core processor as well!